10/24/2026
Interesting.
When people picture Texas now they picture cities, and the numbers tell a different story. ⭐ No state in the country has more farms and ranches than Texas, and no state has more land tied up in them. Not close, either, on either count.
That is a strange thing to sit with when most of the news out of Texas is about traffic and tech campuses and people arriving from somewhere else. Both things are true at once. This state has some of the fastest growing metros in the nation, and it also has entire counties where the population drops every decade and the business of the place is still cattle, cotton, hay, wheat, sorghum and goats. Texas has led the country in cattle for generations and leads it in cotton, and there are more head of cattle inside these borders than there are people living in most states.
What that really adds up to is that an enormous share of Texas is still run by families, on land that has carried the same name for a hundred years, by people nobody outside the county has ever heard of. 🌾 The skyline is what gets photographed. The fence line is what gets maintained.
